Tetra Pak heiress and Granta owner Sigrid Rausing has a feather in her cap now that her author Eleanor Catton has won the Man Booker prize. So what plans for the future of her company, where she has yet to appoint an editor-in-chief? Granta experienced a meltdown in July — and Grantageddon headlines — following the departure of magazine editor John Freeman and Granta books publisher Philip Gwyn Jones.
“Our spring issue is Japan,” Rausing tells BookBrunch. “Yuka Igarashi, our managing editor, is the lead editor of this, and it is the first-ever issue that will be published simultaneously with a foreign-language edition. It will be launched at the Tokyo International Literary Festival in March 2014. We have issues planned for a year ahead, until winter 2015. I will remain acting editor until then. We’ll probably make mistakes. We’ll certainly be criticised along the way but we’ll still take risks and trust our judgment. The whole point of independence is that you can. Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books gave me some good advice this autumn: ‘If somebody tells you it can’t be done or we have never done it before, then do it! Always do the unexpected…’”
